The official blog of Thomas J. Black: independent author and professional blind guy

The last time I visited my mom, she and I did this survey. It was this dumb little survey she probably found on Buzzfeed, or Quizzilla, or whatever. It would determine what sort of witch you were based on how you answered the following questions:

What color is your wand?

What color are your eyes?

What does your spellbook look like?

What do you value the most?

What animal companion would you favor the most?

What is your favorite superpower?

My answers were “black wand”, “green eyes”, a blue book with some symbol my mom described very poorly (I’m guessing it was a pentacle?), “wisdom”, “a cat”, and “telepathy”. And for the record, I picked “telepathy” because “shape shifting” wasn’t an option. But that right there’s a rant for a different day. When I picked those answers, it told me I was a “dream witch”. Dream witches specialize in manipulating the dream world, and appearing in other people’s dreams.

I normally don’t put a whole lot of thoughts into those kind of surveys. I don’t hate them by any means, but I don’t really think about it. Hell, a third of the time, the answers are so obvious, I know how to manipulate the survey to give me the answer I want. And that’s why I always fucking hated those career aptitude tests in high school. This one, however… Well, this one actually got me to thinking.

For as long as I can remember, dreams are something that fascinated me. For a few months, I even kept a blog where I basically wrote about things I could remember from dreams, and tried to piece together what it meant while encouraging all my readers to lend a hand. Sadly, the reader base for that little pet project was a grand total of zero from start to finish. Not to mention towards the end, I was either forgetting ninety-nine percent of my dreams by the time I was awake and ready to write, or I was having nightmares revolving around that albino guy from The House of 1000 Corpses. Again, that’s probably a rant for a different day.

In past story ideas, I’d often incorporated dreams in one way shape or form. Maybe it was relevant to the plot, or maybe it was just a haunting vision of how things could go wrong that TOTALLY isn’t filler. Either way, dreams did make up a good chunk of my earlier work.

A story I wrote in 2006 was based entirely around a demon a woman could only see in her dreams. A demon that wanted to take over her body, and used traumatic memories and phobias to create personifications of everything she lived in fear of. I’d ultimately deleted it halfway into the second draft on the grounds it seemed too much like Indigo Prophecy, though. Honestly, a lot of my work in 2006-2007 felt like a ripoff of Indigo Prophecy in some way or shape. I won’t lie, that game blew my mind when I first played it. And as for the story itself… Well, I’ve considered rewriting it. True, ten years later, my philosophies towards life, the universe, and everything have changed considerably, and said changes might end up taking that character in a much different direction. Either way, this was the backward dark before I even had a word for what it was. Ten years later, the nightmares are bound to get even worse. Either in terms of spookiness, or in terms of stupidity.

Even today, I occasionally incorporate dreams into my story telling. To name a recent example, Gael. As much as I’d like to talk about it here, Gael is still fairly new, and I’d like people to read it for themselves.

I’m not quite as passionate about the concept now as I was in the early days, but I still like the idea that dreams are trying to tell us something. Maybe it’s a message from god, maybe it’s the spirits of Earth trying to communicate with us… In which case, I think somebody needs some god damn Prozac, because my dreams have a tendency to be all over the god damn place.

I don’t want to dismiss the idea that dreams are simply a dumb little movie your brain puts on to distract itself while your body is recharging. Sometimes, my dreams are complete and total nonsense. At the same time, though, I’m not ready to accept that belief as truth. I’ve made a decision or two based around what I saw in dreams, and it hasn’t necessarily steared me wrong.

I still find myself consulting dream dictionaries whenever I feel like someone is trying to tell me something. It’s how I learned that having a pet polar bear in your dream means that an ordeal is coming your way, but you will conquer it. It’s how I learned that seeing a snake in your dreams usually means there’s someone in your life you can’t trust. It’s how I learned that giving someone a foot massage in a dream means you need to learn a lesson in humility. Or that you’re a pervert, and you haven’t quite gotten over the fact you got dumped completely out of the blue by a girl you really thought you had something with. Either one works for me at this point, though I can’t help but want to lean towards the former.